Lost Science is an ongoing series of accounts from scientists who have lost their jobs or funding after cuts by the Trump administration. The conversations have been edited for clarity and length. Here’s why we’re doing this.
Interview by Carl Zimmer
Kim Ballare: In graduate school, I fell in love with bees and other pollinators. They’re so important to our functioning ecosystem, but they’re really unknown to a lot of people. Most people just think about the European honeybee, which is not a native species in the United States. But there are 4,000 species of bees in the United States, and their diversity and their different functions are fascinating. My main species focus during my Ph.D. was on the Eastern Carpenter bee, which is huge — bigger than a bumblebee — and make their nests by chewing into wood with their little jaws.
In 2023, when I got a job with the Forest Service, I was leading a project in Montana looking at how forest management techniques affect pollinators — specifically, logging and prescribed burning. It was my first major grant. We bought a lot of equipment and planned to support a Ph.D. student. The site is a beautiful forest with mainly lodgepole pine and spruce and Douglas fir, with some open areas that are just full of wildflowers like lupines and geraniums and balsam root, which looks like a big sunflower.
A lot of our knowledge about pollinators is about agriculture. But if we didn’t have a diversity of native insects, native plants might not reproduce effectively, and that would reduce food for tons of other wildlife. Just having these interactions is really important to maintain the life of the ecosystem. There isn’t really a lot of work that’s been done on pollinators in forests. We’re increasingly understanding that it’s an important habitat for pollinators.
We were hoping to use environmental DNA. An insect will land on a flower, deposit DNA, and then later you can extract the DNA off the flower to see what insects are visiting it. Often, when we’re doing a pollinator study, we’ll catch an insect with a net, and we can write down what flower it was visiting. But that’s just a snapshot. With environmental DNA, we can potentially see more of the insects that are visiting.
The post She Studied How Logging Affects Pollinators appeared first on New York Times.
